Power Shift 2011 in Washington, DC, April 15-18: "Every Generation Needs a New Revolution"

Thousands of young activists are at the Washington, DC, Convention Center this weekend for the PowerShift 2011 conference. Power Shift 2011 seeks to mark a turning point for the youth climate movement – an emergence into a position of leadership in the political battle for a clean energy transformation.

Climate Science Watch will be there.

Some of the most transformative movements have been led by young people who were not afraid to speak truth to power and demonstrate their commitment to radical changes.

Power Shift 2011 is a project of the Energy Action Coalition, a coalition of 50 youth-led environmental and social justice groups.

Today – Saturday, April 16, at 3:30 p.m. – I will be participating on a panel that is one of many panels, workshops, and training sessions at the conference. The title of the session is “Winning the Climate Argument: Health, National Security, Economics, and Climate Denial.”

On Monday April 18, the gathering will conclude with a rally at the White House followed by two marches, one to Capitol Hill and the other "from one corporate polluter's office to another" (including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) in downtown Washington. Participants will spend Monday afternoon lobbying in Congressional offices.

3 Responses to Power Shift 2011 in Washington, DC, April 15-18: "Every Generation Needs a New Revolution"

Power Shift is exactly the kind of event needed to help raise awareness in the U.S. right now, especially in the light of recent political tactics to limit GHG emission regulations by the EPA. Students from my college, University of Missouri at Kansas City, are attending Power Shift to learn effective new ways to spread the word here at home that climate science is not a political issue, and it cannot be ignored forever. The longer we wait to implement real, effective climate control policy, the worse our situation is getting. Unfortunately, it will be the next generations that will have to deal with the mess we leave them. It is a very sad state when people listen to what politicians have to say about climate science, rather than listening to the warnings being issued by scientists. We cannot keep our heads in the sand forever. We need more advocates speaking out against irresponsible anti-GHG regulation policies and Power Shift is one way to make that happen.

Mass movements of young people hinged around seriously disputed conjectures about the possible impact of CO2 on the climate system are not an attractive sight. It is alarming for the youngsters to believe in what they have been led to believe is beyond dispute. It is alarming for society as a whole to see so much policy being pushed with such confidence when there has not been any observational evidence of weather, or weather-related phenomena, to suggest that anything unusual has been happening to temperatures, precipitation, storm intensities and frequencies, etc etc. The rising levels of CO2 still leave that gas as an extremely minor constituent of the atmosphere, and even a further doubling or trebling of those levels will not change that. The radiative properties of CO2 are not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether or not their increased impact will even be reliably detectable in the swirl of climate variations due to innumerable other factors. I see no grounds for undue concern at this stage. A further doubling of CO2 levels seems inexorable at present, and so far there is no indication whatsoever that we will notice an impact of that except perhaps a further greening of our planet as plantlife gets a a little boost. There are better and more important things for our young people to be concerned with than this gas.

There is plenty of observational evidence to suggest that temperatures have been changing. Whether you agree with human causality of temperature increases or not, it cannot be disputed that temperatures ARE rising. Start here and interpret the data for yourself. This is raw temperature data from NASA.